As could have been guessed, Mueller’s hotly-anticipated Russia collusion report has been summarized by Attorney General William Barr, and it has found no evidence of collusion and no reason to pursue obstruction of justice charges against the president.

In other words, it’s a Nothingburger.

And after two years of breathless repition on the certainty of “Russian Collusion” from left-leaning media outlets, major news media from CNN to The New York Times have some serious explaining to do.

After all, the last two years could have been spent exposing real corruption within Trump’s White House. They could have been spent reporting on perpetual war and US foreign policy fueling famine, arms sales to jihadists, and human trafficking in both American cities and in faraway places. On real, dire issues facing Americans and humanity at large.

Instead, countless hours and column inches were spent jabbering about nonsense — all because of an endless appetite and infantile obsession on the Left for anything anti-Trump. After all, hysteria and conspiracy theories sell more newspapers than serious, methodical reporting.

Meanwhile, relations with Russia are as bad as they’ve been for several administrations. This alone, to anyone with common sense, would indicate that maybe Trump isn’t so buddy-buddy with Putin. But as a direct consequence of the mainstream media’s pet conspiracy theory, Trump has been under immense pressure to stay “tough on Russia” to avoid further collusion accusations. As a result, we have been put on a course of more hostile relations — even a new Cold War — with the world’s only other major nuclear power.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, though I disagree with him on plenty, is a gem: a thoughtful journalist at a left-leaning publication who tries to look at each story on its own merits, rather than through a partisan lens. He wrote:

So the question is, will the media be held accountable for the very real role they’ve played in accelerating hostilities with a nuclear power, contributing to the waste of millions in taxpayer dollars, and de-legitimizing the hard work of fantastic journalists all around the world who will now have their credibility challenged by default when they try to report on malfeasance within the Trump administration?

The short answer is: Don’t count on it.

Save for an isolated mea culpa or two, the same discredited people will continue reporting to America on the issues of the day. They’re the same people who failed to challenge the economists who appeared on their shows and failed to predict the 2008 financial collapse. They’re the same journalists who got raises in the months and years following their repition of the Bush Administration’s made-up WMD story that got us into a perpetual war in Iraq, costing many thousands of innocent lives. The media will continue to get it wrong, and the people will continue to forget.

In the meantime, advertisers will continue to collect their fees from the same media outlets — as long as the anti-Trump conspiracy theories they push continue to drive ratings, clicks, shares, and comments.

In a desperate attempt to save face, many journalists and pundits are posting frantically to social media to assure their followers that something Russia-like was DEFINITELY going on, regardless of the report’s findings. After two years of tweeting things like Justice will be served! and When the Mueller Report is released, Trump is finished!, the disgraced partisan narcissists pushing the Russia nonsense at the expense of real, substantive news have been reduced to nonsense arguments and empty justifications like the following:

Mueller finds Russians aided Trump but the campaign didn’t conspire. Knowing this, Trump could have denounced Russia all along and backed the investigation. Instead he publicly asked for Russian help, falsely denied receiving any, and said Republican investigators were Democrats.

(Rachel Maddow retweeted this, effectively saying that because Attorney General Barr only summarized and quoted from the report, that we can’t trust his interpretation of the investigation’s conclusion.)

(Now that the collusion idiocy has been debunked, Vox is informing their readers, as if it’s breaking news, of what has been widely known for many years: Russia does what it can to influence U.S. elections in what they perceive as their favor. Meanwhile Trump victory-tweets, knowing he has been immensely strengthened by this whole debacle.)

There you have it, folks. Two years of this, and Trump is stronger than ever. Will the “Resistance” ever learn? On the contrary, their early responses indicate this episode will merely cause them to double down and begin looking for any new sensational story that could take down their orange nemesis and fulfill their fantasy of seeing him in handcuffs…